Your Right to Know

View SlideshowRequest to buy this photoEamon Queeney | DISPATCHLondon Police Officer Michael Combs is measured for new body armor by Scott Long of Vane’s Law Enforcement. Proposed city budget cuts include laying off five of the police department’s 18 members.

LONDON, Ohio — Even if budget cuts force Police Chief Dave Wiseman to lay off nearly a third of
his department’s employees, he knows this: If people need the police, they will get help.

The help might come more slowly, and it could come at increased risk to the officer, who might
have to respond alone, but still, it will come, Wiseman said.

Something else worries him more. In the next three years, six members of the department are
eligible, and likely, to retire. That includes the chief. Do the math, Wiseman said: A department
with 18 officers goes down to 13 after the layoffs, and then six of its most-experienced officers
and commanders retire.

Long term, he says, nothing good can come of that. And as the London City Council gets set to
debate cutting his $1.9 million budget by 15 percent for 2013, he isn’t much for sugarcoating.

“It’s a crisis, a crisis at the moment, yeah, but an even bigger crisis down the road,” said
Wiseman, a 23-year veteran of the department and its chief since 2009. “It will take awhile to
realize the impact, and no one is going to like what this city will become.”

Councilman Stan Kavy and Wiseman disagreed on the fairness of a 15 percent budget cut for all
departments that the city council is likely to approve soon, but they agree that London is at a
crossroads.

“People really have to decide right now whether they want to help save London,” said Kavy,
chairman of the council’s finance committee, which drew up the current plan for the city’s proposed
$4.3 million general-fund budget for next year.

The saving that Kavy was referring to is a 0.5 percent income-tax increase for the fire
department on the Nov. 6 ballot. If voters approve that tax, about $800,000 in city money now
funneled to the fire department would be freed up for the general fund.

But even if the tax passes, it won’t be enough to stop the pending cuts, most officials
agree.

Mayor David Eades has said he thinks the council is acting rashly. He’s hopeful that if the tax
passes, the cuts won’t have to be as deep.

In addition to the police layoffs, the planned cuts would mean, among other things, that the
fire department would lose most of its part-time help; the law director would lose his clerk; the
city pool wouldn’t open next summer; the community center might close; and the auditor, council
president and building inspector would take pay cuts.

And even with all that, it still looks as if the city will run more than $200,000 in the red
next year, said Auditor Katie Hensel.

State-funding cuts have meant a loss to the city of about $193,000 since 2007, and the budget
also took a hit because it had benefited from a couple of years of large state-inheritance-tax
windfalls.

Hensel said overspending, not under-funding, has been the problem. In 2008, city leaders stopped
funding any capital projects and shifted that money to shore up the general-fund budget. Hensel,
the auditor since January, said that was a mistake.

“They’ve been robbing Peter to pay Paul, and we’re in the position we’re in because cuts that
should have been made before weren’t made,” she said. “What the city needed to do, and what it
needs to do right now, is prioritize. Some people say I’m just a doomsdayer, but across-the-board
cuts don’t require choices to be made. And we need to choose.”

Wiseman said that whenever the council holds its budget hearing — no date has been set — he,
too, will plead for setting priorities.

He says losing five officers would force him to ditch the extras — things he thinks matter most
to the community. The impact: no officers working with the local anti-drug coalition, no safety
expos, fewer officers at the local jazz and strawberry festivals, no time spent on investigations.
In short, no crime prevention.

“I will ask council to prioritize the services they want this city to have and to decide at what
level they want those services,” Wiseman said. “All they are seeing are dollar signs.”